August 2011 Archives

Seven stunning, sun-bleached days with my aunt in Key West--visiting graves, memorial sites, and locations that were important for my Dad particularly and for the family generally--were more rewarding, more beautiful, more humorous, more informative, and more emotionally exhausting than I'd reckoned on. 

The pier my father leaped from as a boy, which has now been partly washed away by hurricanes, is also the pier where my aunt scattered his ashes one evening, alone, after he committed suicide in 2002.  The pier stretches into the water directly next to Casa Marina, the grand resort where Wallace Stevens (on whose difficult, gorgeous poetry I wrote a masters thesis) spent his winters from 1922 until the military commandeered it in World War II. 

I floated there in the warm waves in the Straits of Florida where long ago my father took my brother and me to swim when we were children.  My gaze and thoughts pinged back and forth:  pier, resort.  Childhood, death.  Poetry, privilege.

There were other things I did.  Lovely things.  Fried sweet platanos at El Siboney, delicious bollitos at 5 Brothers, sandals for Emily and Alexis from Kino, a guayabera for the Handsome Husband from a tiny little shop on Fleming (apparently the only place on the island that carries them; tourists want t-shirts), banana body lotion and white ginger perfume from Key West Aloe, which has been there since I was a kid:  the fragrances brought back all kinds of crazy memories of my mother and stepmother.  Cool galleries like the Blue Turtle, Cuba! Cuba!, and the Haitian Art Co.  Touring all the sites where my father, as a local, never thought to take us:  the Hemingway House (wow!), the lighthouse, Truman's Little White House, and so on.  Touristy things that were interesting and fun. 

We drove to the salt ponds, where my aunt herself had never been, after decades living on the island:  two huge green iguanas scuttling fast into the mangroves, a rusting old Cubana airlines prop jet behind a high fence, and nary a tourist in sight.  At night, my aunt and I'd watch mysteries that she'd Netflixed, and then I'd go to bed and read a history of the Keys and a book on Santeria I'd purchased at Key West Island Books.

I saw the big pink building where my father was born on the second floor and where my grandfather ran the print shop down below, the Red Barn Theatre where my father acted in plays, my grandparents' house/print shop (now a little inn) where I'd visited each year as a child.  My aunt patiently guided me around and answered all my questions, and we called my other aunt for a conference call on speakerphone when she didn't know the answers.  The week was rich, full, hectic. 

But on the plane ride home, I felt uneasy and depressed.  I'd come seeking something.  

But closure, resolution, peace with the past?  All still felt elusive.  There'd been no crescendo, no epiphany, no sense of relief.

It's not that I was expecting instant gratification.  I'd waited nine years since my father's death.  I'd put in the walking miles, the research, the effort.  But I expected something.  

As we jolted through turbulence, I began to work on a little essay.  I think it will be about the futility and yet necessity and inevitability (if we're lucky enough to have the means) of "roots trips," those hopeful, fraught journeys back to places of origin.  Line by line, it started to take shape on the page.
 
And as I wrote, gentle reader--as I began to craft vignettes that rhymed with one another, to quote things my aunt had said, to weave in lines from Wallace Stevens, to make it all shapely and true--everything slowly began to coalesce.  To mean. 

The order of things--such as it is and can be--comes, for me, not with the raw experience, but with writing it down.